On June 10, 2024 (7pm at Li Ka Shing Center 120), I will be presenting an informal talk titled “How is Human Embodiment Transformed in an Age of Algorithms?” as part of a Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous (LASER) Talks event.
The four talks that evening are:
– Shane Denson (Stanford/ Film and Media) on “How is Human Embodiment Transformed in an Age of Algorithms?”
– Virginia San Fratello (San Jose State Univ/ Art) on “3D Printing the Future”
– Fiorenza Micheli (Stanford/ Center for Ocean Solutions) on “Harnessing the data revolution for ocean and human health”
– Tom Mullaney (Stanford/ History) on “The Audacity of Chinese Computing”
The new issue of Journal of Visual Culturejust dropped, and I’m excited to see my article on AI art and aesthetics alongside work by Shannon Mattern, Bryan Norton, Jussi Parikka, and others. It looks like a great issue, and I’m looking forward to digging into it!
Recently, I was interviewed by Andrew Myers for Stanford’s School of Humanities and Sciences. The exchange, which focuses on my recent book Post-Cinematic Bodies, is now online: here.
On Thursday, June 29, Hopscotch Reading Room (Gerichtstraße 43 in the Wedding district of Berlin) will be hosting a book launch event for my new book Post-Cinematic Bodies — which will be out both in print and open-access digital formats from meson press. There will be paperbacks available for purchase at the launch, and they’ll be more widely available soon afterwards. If you’re in town, come out around 7pm for a short reading, discussion, and drinks!
On Wednesday, June 14, I’ll be presenting a paper called “AI Art as Tactile-Specular Filter” at the Film-Philosophy Conference at Chapman University (in Orange County, CA). It’s the first time I’ll be attending the conference, which is usually held in the UK, and I am excited to get to know the association, meet up with old and new friends, and hear their papers. The abstract for my paper is below:
AI Art as Tactile-Specular Filter
Though often judged by its spectacular images, AI art needs also to be regarded in terms of its materiality, its temporality, and its relation to embodied existence. Towards this end, I look at AI art through the lens of corporeal phenomenology. Merleau-Ponty writes in Phenomenology of Perception: “Prior to stimuli and sensory contents, we must recognize a kind of inner diaphragm which determines, infinitely more than they do, what our reflexes and perceptions will be able to aim at in the world, the area of our possible operations, the scope of our life.” This bodily “diaphragm” serves like a filtering medium out of which stimulus and response, subject and object emerge in relation to one another. The diaphragm corresponds to Bergson’s conception of affect, which is similarly located prior to perception and action as “that part or aspect of the inside of our bodies which mix with the image of external bodies.” For Bergson, too, the living body is a kind of filter, sifting impulses in a microtemporal interval prior to subjective awareness. In his later work, Merleau-Ponty adds another dimension with his conception of a presubjective écart or fission between tactility and specularity, thus complexifying the filtering operation of the body. With both an interiorizing function (tactility) and an exteriorizing one (specularity), the écart lays the groundwork for what I call the “originary mediality” of flesh—and a view of mediality itself which is always tactile in addition to any visual, image-oriented aspects. This is especially important for visual art produced with AI, as the underlying algorithms operate similarly to the body’s internal diaphragm: as a microtemporal filter that sifts inputs and outputs without regard for any integral conception of subjective or objective form. At the level of its pre-imagistic processing, AI’s external diaphragm thus works on the body’s internal diaphragm and actively modulates the parameters of tactility-specularity, recoding the fleshly mediality from whence images arise as a secondary, precipitate form.
My book Post-Cinematic Bodies, coming soon from meson press, now has a great set of endorsements (blurbs) from three scholars that I greatly respect and admire: Rizvana Bradley, Francesco Casetti, and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht — a group of scholars that reflects the interdisciplinary conversation I hope to provoke across film and media studies, literary theory/philosophical aesthetics, and the study of gender and race in contemporary art and visual culture.
We have long been feeling how the type of embodied identification suggested by the Hollywood classics was in a process of dissolution. Thanks to a sophisticated mediation between the phenomenology of perception and theories of digital media, Shane Denson provides us with concepts and a first understanding of this transition and its far-reaching existential consequences.
—Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Stanford University
What if digital media changed not only traditional forms of communication, but also our very bodies, because of the way they address us? In this brilliant study, Shane Denson suggests that, from a phenomenological perspective, our bodies are always at the forefront of our mediation with the world; digital media involve our sensorium in an unprecedented way and this commitment represents their true “revolution.” A myriad of examples, including screens in gyms aimed at enhancing our exercises, are proof of this. Philosophically dense, analytically sharp, this book unearths what lies beneath our digital experiences.
—Francesco Casetti, Yale University
Refusing both the perfunctory valorization of the body as site of resistive potentiality and the diametric reflex to dismiss theories of embodiment as exercises in the foreclosure of criticality, Shane Denson advances a rigorous theory of mediated corporeality within the metabolic life of post-cinema, with profound implications for the politics of (counter-)capture across microtemporalities and planetary scales.
—Rizvana Bradley, University of California, Berkeley
Coming soon from meson press, in the Configurations of Film book series!
Post-Cinematic Bodies
How is human embodiment transformed in an age of algorithms? How do post-cinematic media technologies such as AI, VR, and robotics target and re-shape our bodies? Post-Cinematic Bodies grapples with these questions by attending both to mundane devices—such as smartphones, networked exercise machines, and smart watches and other wearables equipped with heartrate sensors—as well as to new media artworks that rework such equipment to reveal to us the ways that our fleshly existences are increasingly up for grabs. Through an equally philosophical and interpretive analysis, the book aims to develop a new aesthetics of embodied experience that is attuned to a new age of predictive technology and metabolic capitalism.
The new issue of Senses of Cinema is out now with a special dossier on “The Geometry of Movement: Computer-Generated Imagery in Film,” edited by Luise Morke and Jack Seibert. The dossier is full of exciting articles, and it also includes my piece on “DeepFakes and the (Un)Gendering of the Flesh” — which previews some of what’s in store in my forthcoming book Post-Cinematic Bodies.
Last week I had the honor of presenting some new material at Leif Weatherby’s Digital Theory Lab at NYU, and this week I’ll be traveling to Siegen, Germany, to present another version of this material, focused on the “deep violence” of DeepFakes.
I’m especially excited to present this material, as it draws on a new book project, titled Post-Cinematic Bodies, a draft of which I have just completed! Stay tuned for more!
I recently gave a talk with the unwieldy title “Post-Cinematic Seriality and the Algorithmic Conditions of Identity and Difference” for the Center for Inter-American Studies at the University of Graz and the Austro-American Society for Styria in Austria (see the *somewhat creepy, but appropriately so, lol* flyer below); and on October 12, 2021 (at 6:30pm Central European time / 9:30am Pacific US time) I’ll be giving a related talk with the much more wieldy (possibly misleadingly simple) title “Seriality and Digital Cultures” at the University of Zurich’s English Department (see the flyer with registration info above).
Both of these talks are related to a larger project that I am developing, which will link seriality as a medial form (in both popular and artistic media) and as a social form (following the late Sartre, Iris Marion Young, Benedict Anderson, and others) in order to think about the ways that — with the shift from a broadly “cinematic” media regime (with its past-oriented, memorial, recording, retentional functions) to a “post-cinematic” one (with its future-oriented, anticipatory, predictive, protentional functions) — algorithmic media are poised to transform categories and lived realities of class, gender, and race.
